Oracle president Charles Phillips said in a conference call with analysts and reporters this morning that the Redwood Shores company is moving its middleware into telecom in a big way.

“Once we decide to go into an industry, we go in all the way,” Phillips said. Oracle already has its databases in telecom, and he said the initiative would be sped up by two companies Oracle acquired — Sweden’s Hotsip, which makes telecom infrastructure software and was snapped up in February, and Net4Call, a Norwegian firm that Oracle acquired today.

In addition, last week, Oracle bought Portal Software of Cupertino for $220 million, and last year’s acquisition of Siebel Systems also gives Oracle a foothold into telecom salesforce operations.

Phillips cited telecom industry’s transformation, with the addition of cable companies, virtual operators and voice over Internet firms bringing new competition. “There’s a tremendous amount of change, which usually represents an opportunity to go in and speed up the process,” he said.

If you like to decipher otherwise incomprehensible technology jargon, you can read the press release for yourself. Here, for instance, is the lead:

Building on Oracle’s leadership in middleware and information management and the company’s experience in carrier-grade communications infrastructure, Oracle today outlined its roadmap for a comprehensive, standards-based Service Delivery Platform (SDP) for the telecommunications industry

UPDATE: Larry Velez, senior analyst, Forrester Research telecom services group, called with a take on the announcement, which I’ll post on the jump.

Velez said that as telecommunications companies enter an era of rapid change, Oracle sees an opportunity to sell them its Oracle Fusion middleware product. Middleware helps tie the database foundation to the applications that access the information in the database — and Oracle, the database leader, is increasingly moving into applications with its acquisitions of companies like Siebel Systems and PeopleSoft.

Oracle already has its database installed at most of the large telecom firms.

“The database is their foot in the door,” Velez said. “The Fusion software becomes a value-added up-sell for them. To make it attractive, they have to position it for what the telcos are thinking and talking about, their next generation strategy.”

“The next generation network for a telco technically could do two things: It would help them create services faster, and at a lower cost. If they can do this reliably enough, then they can get rid of their old stuff.

“Oracle wants to position themselves to help the telcos create new applications to get to the new world faster.

“At the same time, their position is trying to be sensitive to the old stuff. One of the acquisitions, Net4Call, gives them interfaces to the old world. It’s a neat story to tell, because Oracle can give you access to the new, as well as migrate the old to the new.”

Until now, that field has been led by BEA Systems of San Jose, but Velez said, “Oracle thinks since it’s a multi-billion dollar company, it should be able to outmuscle BEA in this space.”

It has to hurry. Because the telecoms plan to spend billions to upgrade their services and start adding things like VOIP, many tech firms are jockeying for their business, including heavyweights like Microsoft and IBM.

“Microsoft is spending quite a lot of money to make their play into the telcos,” Velez said, “and Oracle is in that space to make sure Microsoft doesn’t walk away with it all.”